CHRISTOPHER GRAY

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Neko Case and Haru Bangs last weekend First things first: Neko Case is the complete package, an unmitigated bombshell (gorgeous, wry, self-effacing) with a singular artistic vision (country/folk songs so heavy on metaphor and animistic and obscure mythological references that you could — and should — unpack them for months) and a voice like an air-raid siren.

Robert Stillman returns with Master Box Robert Stillman's music is like an anachronistic, sepia-toned spin on the fanciful film scores of Jon Brion (Punch-Drunk Love, I Heart Huckabees). Both make fleet-footed, extremely visual piano songs with trotting melodies, a natural fit for an old silent short.

Deer Tick take it to the roadhouse The last time Deer Tick were in Portland, at SPACE Gallery in November 2007, then-21-year-old frontman John McCauley decided to sing the national anthem. He sprung offstage and hit the floor belting the Tony Bennett standard "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" in a nasal voice soaked in equal parts whiskey, battery acid, and gravel.

And Luke Kalloch On record, Femi Kuti can't help but come off as a slightly vanilla version of his mad genius father Fela (popularizer of Afrobeat music, also known for having 12 wives at once, among other things).

From the gridiron to gritty realism at the Maine International Film Festival Among the many treats at last year's Maine International Film Festival were a future Oscar winner (James Marsh's documentary Man on Wire ) and one of the biggest art-house hits of 2008 (Scandinavian teen-vampire flick Let the Right One In ).

Ron Currie Jr. has a blast with the apocalypse once more In the most memorable piece in Waterville author Ron Currie Jr.'s 2007 debut short story collection, God is Dead (Viking), God is reincarnated as a Dinka woman in a refugee camp in Sudan, who enlists a jive-talking Colin Powell in an effort to find a young boy.

No irony here There is no irony at Bentley's Saloon. This is kind of hard to process, because the crowd at the bar is totally incoherent: there are, primarily, biker dudes and chicks, along with cowboy types, hard-drinking college kids, senior citizens, and the odd hippie with dreadlocks.

Burma VJ's heroic dissident journalists Anders Østergaard's Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country is paced and edited with the keen, polished urgency of a thriller — there are frantic, confused phone conversations, along with gloomy music and a healthy amount of ominous foreshadowing — but most of its footage is shaky, off-center, and drastically pixelated, even when viewed on a television.

Aging and patriotism in The Way We Get By The film, a decidedly unlikely crowd-pleaser, has had a charmed year so far. It won a Special Jury Award upon its world premiere at Austin, Texas's SXSW Film Festival, and an Audience Award at the prestigious Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina, becoming something of a "little documentary that could" on the festival circuit.

Bands come, go, and get bashed One of the big topics of social conversation in Portland last week was the anonymous Portland Point blog's ruthless, somewhat self-negating takedown of the Honey Clouds' May 23 CD-release show.

Ocean and Pontiak at SPACE Gallery, May 5 The day after Ocean's predictably under-attended (30-40 people) Cinco de Mayo performance at SPACE, a friend who also attended asked what I thought. "So loud," I said. "So slow," he responded. It wasn't hard to catch the reverence in both reactions.

Pollan and Schlosser, on message, in Food, Inc. Following in the Peabody Award-winning footsteps of Aaron Wolf's congenial, informative documentary King Corn, Robert Kenner's omnibus agri-doc Food, Inc . offers a bleaker portrait of America's food economy at this year's Food+Farm event series, centered at SPACE Gallery from May 7 to 10.

The Thermals' tentatively ambivalent Now We Can See Amid a barrage of assessments of our new president's first 100 days in office, it's a ripe time for the Thermals to come back to Portland and offer their two cents'.

Arthur Russell's posthumous renaissance Arthur Russell's music does little to illuminate the mysteries and vagaries of his life. It simply tosses them aside, in pursuit of moods and rhythms few have successfully replicated, two decades later.

Jonah Lehrer on neurological warfare and picking a cereal Those of us aching for a 300-page treatise about the crippling implications of the "build your own scramble" at Local 188 won't, at first glance, find a great deal of solace in Jonah Lehrer's second book, How We Decide.

Counseling New York's exploited Very Young Girls Like the drug dealers in The Wire or accounts of illegal trafficking of any form, the current and former teenage prostitutes in David Schisgall's documentary Very Young Girls don't often refer to their trade as a job.

Three restless souls try to settle down Two of indie music's most popular and tortured songwriters, Will Oldham and Neko Case, try to reconcile encroaching middle age with a past of bad habits on their new albums.